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Which brings me onto the subject of @beeple’s actual work: "EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS"
1 / Christie’s offers something @nifty @superrare and other platforms can’t do (yet) context. This is why I keep talking about NFT platforms hiring arts professionals not programmers.
2 / 5000 days I think is a major work of art, period. Not major work of digital art, or NFT art. A major work of art.
3 / While undoubtably @christie’s sense a windfall and are looking to capitalise on the NFT rocket ship, I think and hope they do to think of it
4 / Seeing @beeple’s 5000 day practice laid out before us in its kaleidoscopic enormity stands testament to a singular artist’s vision.
6 / While @beeple's work has only recently drawn subject matter from crypto, It is a practise that speaks deeply to the idea of the blockchain itself.
7 / Started even before the Bitcoin blockchain itself, @beeple's work presents itself as a blockchain, published block by block with a computational regularity. 8 / @beeple I believe is only just starting to take note of art history proper, for he is starting to see his place.
8 / His hermitic practice, silo’ed up till now in the digital realm, stands alongside many of the major daily practices that have been lionised by the art historical canon. Roman Opalka painted numbers daily for 35 years from 1965 to the early 2000’s, he died painting numbers.
9 / On Kawara’s painted the Date of the day on a small canvas, every day for his whole life. @Beeple’s commitment to his practice places him within this exceptional lineage.
10 / Does @beeple stand as the digital art world first ‘outsider artist’, (this is a specific art term: pls look it up). A modern-day Jean Dubuffet? Certainly within the traditional fine art world, his practice has remained undetected for 5000 days.
11 / In this he stands as the most contemporary exponent of the art brut moment.
12 / ( By the way this isn't art mumbojumbo, this is real I hope informed opinion) and while many in the traditional art world may scoff that these parallels I ask them why not? What makes you feel so uncomfortable about it? Because it challenges you in a new way? Thats great art
13 / This is not just an art historical parallel but a formal and aesthetic one too.
14 / The more I engage with @Beeple’s work, the more I enjoy it. The prolific creative madness reminds me a lot of Dubuffet’s work and terminology of the art brut movement.
15 / There is a naivety and honesty to @beeple’s work that stands as a remarkable counterpoint to the cynicism and self-reflecting art historical referencing of the art world proper.
16 / Writing in early 1950’s Dubuffet terms art brut, “ Those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere – are, because of these very facts, more precious than the ..
17 / productions of professionals. After a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works...
19 / cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade." I think these words on the role of truth in art speaks volumes to @beeples work written some 70 years before the Everyday’s were first exhibited.
20 / @beeple’s work functions as one of the 21st century’s most potent artistic diaries, a political and social visual narrative of the early part of this century. His work reminds me of Philip Guston’s political drawings, only recently resurrected within the art historical canon
21 / They look back to a period in the Victorian era were the cartoon carries art historical weight, lead by the likes of William Hogarth.
22 / Somewhere along the line we lost the value of the everyday, the artistic reflection of the daily environment, the news, and the topic du jour. It became coopted by the theory and aesthetics, which while I love, lost some of its reliability, and lost equally some of audience
23 / Art can be high-minded, diffident and cool, but it can also be populist, accessible, bawdy, immediate and visceral. And its accessibility it carries a universality that makes fundamental to art history. @beeple’s work stands testament to that.
24 / I have said before, the work would be inordinately better if it carried a larger awareness of its place in art history, but seeing them together as a vast body of work, one sees a metaphor for artistic endeavour itself.
25 / Artistic endeavour without “the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion” to quote to Dubuffet. Artistic endeavour irrespective of celebrity. Artist endeavour in the gradual refining of one practice. Artist endeavour in the celebration of craft and technology.
26 / For we only know one thing for sure when the 25th comes and 5000 will disappear, @beeple will sit down and make another Everyday.
P.S. If you buy 5000 please donate it to a museum. Remember you can still own it and view it on the blockchain. Thanks
P.S. If you buy 5000 please donate it to a museum. Remember you can still own it and view it on the blockchain. Thanks
